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My children are grown now so we missed the Elf on a Shelf extravaganza. And, no I am not sorry. Not that we didn’t have our own, certainly less KGB, elf tradition. It began with my father. But really, it began with his five sisters and three brothers on a tobacco farm in 1930s North Carolina. There wasn’t a lot of money in this big family but there was a lot of love. The older children looked out for the younger right down to making sure the magic and mystery of Christmas, elves and all, was never forgotten. They are all gone now; my father was the last. But, they left me with a lasting love of the season and an unshakeable belief in the power of family love.

It is a fact that I tend toward melancholy. This is not to be confused with having a sentimental streak. THAT I do not. At our recent yard sale—which nearly killed me and several of the shoppers—I all but threw merchandize (including vintage linen and quilts, 60-year old, pristine kid gloves, silver plate whiskey sour muddlers and a set of library steps) at the milling crowd. “Take it,” I screamed, “Just get it out of here!” When a particularly creepy man asked us if there was more to see inside the house I almost told him “Yes, just go in there and strip the joint!”

It’s time to put on my reflecto-vision glasses. What? You don’t have a pair? You know, the ones you buy off the back of an Archie comic, right next to the X-ray Specs and the itching powder. Most people go for the X-ray Specs because the picture shows a lady in her undies. But, in case you haven’t wasted that allowance yet, they don’t work. The reflecto-vision glasses, on the other hand, are guaranteed to show you the past with a mixture of insight and nausea. I know, mine are hanging on the chain with my readers. January is as good an excuse as any to take a look through them.

I have been reading a lot of books about faeries and shape shifters lately. I read a lot of books, period. But, you knew that about me. Since my daughter Emma became a more eager reader in the last couple of years I have taken up Young Adult fiction. No, that’s not true. I have rediscovered that kind of fiction and I am terribly grateful to Emma for that. Right now, there is a lot of crud filed away under Young Adult, a lot of scary, ugly, angry stuff in those books. But, there is magic, too. There’s the real kind, faeries and wizards and talking animals, and there is the more subtle kind, those words written by a grownup, a mother or a father perhaps, that so perfectly capture a voice (theirs, maybe, their own voice remembered) that both Emma and I say “Yes, that is exactly how it feels!” Exactly how it still feels.

I spent a bare 24 hours in deepest, darkest Wiltshire last week. It isn’t that deep, a couple of hours outside London and it isn’t that dark, the sun duked it out with the rain the whole time we were there. And let’s be honest, 24 hours is hardly a trip, it’s a ‘tripette’ as my friend Fiona would say. In fact, she did say it as we piled into the car with my husband.

I have a friend, one of those real ones that your kid brings over to you on the playground or in front of the school and says, “Here, this is so and so’s Mum, you’ll love her.” There are other real ones, like the girl you met Freshman year in college who is so different from you and yet so alike that you can’t stop listening to her stories and you start using the same soap she does because you want to smell just like her. But more about her, another time.

In the mornings, after everyone has gone to school, I make my way through the house. I pick clothes up off the floor, stack notebooks, flush toilets and yes, make beds. Now, while it’s true that my children make their own beds, I remake them. I wonder if, when they are in their rooms at the end of the day, they look at their beds and marvel at how the duvets are smooth and unruffled, the pillows piled just so. Do they think, damn, I make a fine bed? Do they silently thank me for my controlling ways? Probably not.